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• RETAIL SEGMENT: Wellness & Beauty
• PRODUCT: Engage™
• CHALLENGE: Clarisonic wanted to maximize revenue per session by optimizing home page content tiles for different customer segments.
• RESULTS: Using RichRelevance Engage, Clarisonic achieved the following performance on its home page content tiles:*
  • 20% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR)
  • 24% increase in revenue per session
  • 35% increase in overall clicks

* Comparing performance from October 2014 against October 2015.

“The fact that I can keep testing content and justify why I’m showing it is amazing! I’m confident that these data-driven decisions are helping to move visitors efficiently through the purchase funnel.” Casey Davidson Director of Ecommerce and Digital Marketing , Clarisonic.

Clarisonic’s mission is to beautifully transform skin through its award-winning devices, which cleanse skin six times better than hands. Hand-assembled at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, the devices are distributed through prestige retailers, dermatologists, cosmetic surgeons, spas and online at Clarisonic.com. Clarisonic is part of the L’Oreal Group.

As Director of Ecommerce and Digital Marketing for Clarisonic, Casey Davidson is in charge of managing customer website experiences to achieve the directto-consumer revenue goals for the business. In addition to optimizing traffic, conversion and revenue, the Clarisonic.com team manages all content, paid media channels, affiliates, search engine optimization and search engine marketing as well as retargeting, email and loyalty programs.

For Davidson, engaging and educating the new user is a critical objective for the website. When new visitors have their first experience with the brand on the website, she wants the site to represent the “knowledge hub of the brand” so they can learn everything—from which Clarisonic device is right for them to what skin care products and brush heads pair best with their chosen device.

Old way: multiple messages meet multiple needs

Prior to working with RichRelevance, Davidson’s team used a carousel approach for their website homepage. A rotating carousel of three to four content tiles cycled through the home page, switching to one static tile during sale periods.

Davidson considered this method to be standard but outdated. “Promoting multiple messages regardless of behavior, and hoping one sticks, was not ideal. We gained no insight into the segmentation of our customer database—who’s coming, what they’re interested in,” said Davidson.

While the approach satisfied internal stakeholders who wanted frequent home page updates and wanted to ensure that a variety of messages for different products were seen, the issue remained: It was impossible to determine which messages resonated with visitors.

Personally, Davidson felt that it could be hard for visitors to digest any message moving through a carousel, let alone decide where to click. With no analytics or data to back up the message choices being made, she knew it was time for a change.

“We spend a lot of money to drive folks to the website and my job is to make sure they convert with the highest revenue per session,” said Davidson.

New way: content and context motivate visitors through the purchase funnel

Having learned about RichRelevance through existing partnerships with sister brands at L’Oreal, Davidson decided to use the Engage™ solution to segment audiences, and test and optimize content tiles against key metrics—clickthrough rate and revenue per session.

“Everyone will always have an opinion, but our job is to move from opinions to data-based decisions that show what customers are gravitating toward,” said Davidson. “Clickthrough rate may be a function of creative; revenue per session may be function of the right message and content. A lot of times we don’t know, and that’s why it’s critical to always be testing.”

RichRelevance Engage maps individual shopper behavior against advanced targeting and audience segmentation tools so that marketers can deliver highly personalized campaigns with relevant content. Its ability to automatically target each segment, optimize the most effective creative for that segment, then pass the data back to the business to inform creative decisions for the next round of campaigns saves valuable time and eliminates the need to run hundreds of manual A/B tests to get content personalization right.

Clarisonic implemented Engage in June 2015, and has seen significant success in key metrics for users that interact with its home page content tiles, such as a 20 percent increase in clickthrough rate and a 24 percent increase in revenue per session, while also seeing a 35 percent increase in overall clicks.

“Engage gave us information on what messages and creative were resonating with customers. We tested 12-15 pieces of content for each customer segment and found two that resonated very well: ‘Find your Clarisonic’, which linked visitors to an interactive skin quiz recommendation engine, and a tile with the message ‘Great Skin Starts Here,’ which highlighted our key skin care benefits to our users,” said Davidson.

With plans to continue testing current content “winners” against new content, Davidson looks forward to uncovering more learnings and insight from using Engage.

“The fact that I can keep testing content and justify why I’m showing it is amazing! I’m confident that these data-driven decisions are helping to move visitors efficiently through the purchase funnel,” she said.